Make your own Christmas tree decorations

Homemade Christmas decorations not only beat the credit crunch, they add an extra-special personal touch to your celebrations

What you need

Polystyrene shapes: hearts and balls, available from craft stores and haberdashery departments
Dressmaker's pins
Sequins
Beads
Selection of ribbons, lengths depend on size of polystyrene shape, but approximately 1 metre per shape
Ready-mixed paint

Making the round decorations:

For ball measuring 20cm or 25cm in diameter: Wrap approximately one metre of 1cm-wide ribbon, in a colour of your choice, around the ball (hold the ribbon in place with pins where necessary).
For the smaller ball, use the ribbon to divide the ball into eight sections.
For the larger decoration, divide the ball into four sections.
Do not cut off any remaining ribbon, as this will be used as a hanging loop.
Pin sequins into the polystyrene ball, using different colours to make patterns, but make sure you can't see any of the white ball.
When the ball is completely covered with sequins, fold the remaining ribbon into a loop and secure with more sequins.

Note: The finished balls are quite heavy, so you may want to glue the ribbon to the balls first and then cover with sequins.

Making the heart-shaped decorations:

Take polystyrene hearts (about 9cm long) as above.
Pin a selection of coloured sequins as before, but this time, add some beads to the decoration.

Note: These decorations are fairly time-consuming to make, so to save time, you can use wider ribbon or paint the polystyrene shapes first. This way, you do not have to use as many pins, beads or sequins to hide the white, but you still get a super-glittery finish.

Decorated gift box

You could use this to present the tree decorations as gifts

Cover the outside of an existing small box with strips of coloured tissue paper. Add stars and glitter. Fill with scrunched up tissue paper and insert your gift.